Health care a hot topic in Senate race

In Massachusetts’ contentious U.S. Senate race, few issues divide the two candidates more sharply than the health care law signed by President Barack Obama and upheld by the Supreme Court.

Steve LeBlanc, Associated Press

In Massachusetts’ contentious U.S. Senate race, few issues divide the two candidates more sharply than the health care law signed by President Barack Obama and upheld by the Supreme Court.

Republican Scott Brown ran for the Senate in 2010 vowing to be the crucial 41st vote needed to block the initiative, which ultimately passed despite his opposition. He remains critical of the law.

His Democratic challenger, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, has praised the Affordable Care Act, which was modeled after a 2006 Massachusetts law signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican Party nominee for president. Warren said the federal law has helped expand access to health care in Massachusetts and the nation.

Last month’s Supreme Court ruling has only intensified the debate.

The latest salvo came from Brown in response to reports that U.S. employers added only 80,000 jobs in June, a third straight month of weak hiring. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent.

Brown called the numbers “grim” and faulted in part what he said were the “job-killing taxes on individuals, families and small businesses” Warren supports, including those in the health care law.

“These are bad ideas under normal circumstances, but with our economy teetering on the brink, Professor Warren’s economic prescription would push us over the precipice,” Brown said.

Warren has been equally emphatic in her support of the law and her criticism of Brown.

“This decision ensures that millions of children, seniors, and families will continue to benefit from health care reform,” Warren said. Warren has also highlighted some of the law’s more popular elements – including banning insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing medical conditions and allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26.

One reason the debate is so testy is the role Massachusetts played in helping craft the federal law. The 2006 state law served as a blueprint for Obama’s law – including one of its most debated elements, the “individual mandate” that requires nearly everyone be insured or pay a tax penalty.

When he was pushing the bill in 2006, Romney favored the mandate, saying it would target “free riders” – those who can afford health coverage but instead rely on emergency rooms for free care, driving up insurance premiums for everyone else. Romney ended up winning bipartisan support for the measure among Massachusetts lawmakers, including Brown, then a state senator.

Despite their support for the state law, Romney and Brown both now say the federal law should be repealed.